Tag: Much Ado About Nothing

Happy Birthday to Me! Happy Birthday to Me! etc etc. And secondly, Happy Birthday to the paperback edition of Sweet Nothing which is out this week. In honour of these twin excitements I have put together a little present for one of you lovely reading type people out there. And here it is: We have got a copy of Sweet Nothing (to be signed, of course), a fab tote bag, a Midsummer Dreams notebook and bookmark, and because Sweet Nothing and Midsummer Dreams are both published by Choc Lit, there will almost certainly be some chocolate added to the haul as well. So what do you have to do to be in with a chance of owning all of these lovely things? Well you need to enter a little competition. This is how: Simply add a comment below, telling me which Shakespeare play you’d most like to read a contemporary adaptation of and why? I’ve done Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Which play would you like to see as book 3 in the 21st Century Bard series? The best idea and reason, based on my entirely subjective opinion, wins.

Here comes the dull bit… this competition is open from 0:01am to 11.59pm BST on August 6th 2015. It’s open to anyone 18 or over with a British or Irish postal address where the prize can be sent. One entry per person. One prize pack available. Winning entry will be selected on Friday 7th August. Good luck!

Would you risk everything for love?

Independent, straight-talking Trix Allen wouldn’t. She’s been in love once before and ended up with nothing. Now safely single, Trix is as far away from the saccharine-sweet world of hearts and flowers as it’s possible to be.

Ben Messina is the man who broke Trix’s heart. Now he’s successful the only thing rational Ben and free-spirited Trix see eye-to-eye on is the fact that falling in love isn’t part of the plan. But when Ben’s brother sets out to win the heart of Trix’s best friend, romance is very much in the air. Will Trix gamble everything on love and risk ending up with zero once again?

Sweet Nothing is a fresh and funny retelling of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, set in the present day.

So this time next week I shall be in Telford getting ready for my fourth RNA Conference. That realisation made me also realise that it is now 1 whole year since I signed my first ever publishing contract with Choc Lit to publish Sweet Nothing, followed later in the year with a second contact for Holly’s Christmas Kiss.

One year on from such great excitement seems like as good a time as any to get a bit melancholy, raise a glass of something suspiciously green-looking, and have a bit of a think about the process of getting from ‘Hey guys, I’m going to write a novel!’ to actually having a novel out there in the world, where unsuspecting strangers, some of whom aren’t even friends of your mum, might read it.

And the conclusion of that little think would be this: it takes a village to make a novel. Not an actual village. It’s not compulsory for budding novelists to move to Little Middlewitch and start helping out with the church flowers. I’m talking about one of those metaphorical villages that exist only for the purposes of slightly laboured and clichéd metaphor. The Sweet Nothing Metaphorical Village takes in many helpful souls. There are the tutors and workshop leaders whose ideas I’ve cribbed and developed. There are the critique readers. There are the supportive wine-supplying friends who tolerate the fact that most of my gossip is about made up people. There’s the actual publisher who decided to invest their time and money in my work, and then there’s the editor, copy-editor, proofreader, cover designer and blurb writer. And then once the book is out there’s the audiobook people, and the pr dudes, and the book reviewers and bloggers who’ve featured me or my books on their site.

So it’s one whole year since I signed the contract with Choc Lit to publish Sweet Nothing. It’s six years since I first decided I wanted to write a romantic comedy, and decided that I wanted to base it on what I consider to be the ultimate rom-com from stage, book or screen. And the end result is a story that owes everything to my random set of pre-occupations: love and how it’s not the same as romance, how clever people can do stupid things, how knowing stuff is brilliant, tequila is dangerous, and M&S party food is the highest form of food. All of that stuff is part of me, but none of it would be out there in a vaguely readable form without the rest of the Sweet Nothing Metaphorical Village.

So please all raise your glasses. Wait. I didn’t mention that you needed glasses, did I? Ok. Those of you who are already glass-ready, give everyone else a second to pour themselves a tiny drinkette. Right, so please raise your glasses and let’s make a toast, to everyone in the Sweet Nothing Metaphorical Village. Cheers, and thank-you all.

A tiny wee bonus blog post this week as I’ve been tagged by Laura E James to carry on a little blog hop all about our main characters. Thank-you Laura, and let’s all say ‘Hello’ to Trix from Sweet Nothing. I mean, don’t actually say ‘Hello’ out loud whilst you’re reading. She’s a fictional character, which is just one of many many reasons that that would be weird.

Anyway…

What is the name of the main character? Is she real or fictitious?

She’s called Trix and she’s fictitious. I’ve already told you that. Really, it’s almost like these are preset questions and there isn’t actually an interviewer sitting beside me hanging on my every word.

When and where is the story set?

Sweet Nothing is set in York around about now. I lived in York for four years and grew up not far away in Scarborough so it’s a city I know pretty well. The fictional Trix went to university there, like me, and, unlike me, never quite managed to leave.

She loves books, and cake, and wine, and her friends, and marmitey toast, which are all the main important things that one ought to love in life.

What is the main conflict? What messes up her life?

I’m sorry but if I tell you that I’m pretty much telling you the whole story of the book! OK – I’ll tell you this. Trix is pretty sorted in most areas of her life, but she’s not the best at romance. She’s not a sad chick lit singleton though. There’s not a lot of moaning about failed relationships into her pinot going on for Trix, not least because that would slow down the drinking of the pinot and suggest a worrying lack of focus.

She gets on fine with men. She has lots of male friends. There’s just one in particular that might be the problem. Hello Ben Messina.

What is Trix’s goal?

I think the achievement of a diet based solely on wine and marmitey toast. It’s a goal she’s not that far off achieving.

So if you like the sound of Trix, you can find out more about her by reading the book:

And now it’s my turn to tag two more innocent victims willing participants in the ‘Meet my main character’ blog hop. Next up are the brilliant and lovely Janice Preston – her debut novel, Mary and the Marquis will be out in July – and my equally wonderful fellow-ChocLiteer, Berni Stevens. As well as writing her own novels, Berni also designs all the Choc Lit covers so she’s responsible for the rather excellent redness above. Look out for their posts next week.

Ta dah!

So there is it. The cover for my first novel. The astute amongst you will also notice that it has a new title. The book formerly known as ‘Well it’s the book I wrote; it’s sort of about love and maths and stuff and it’s based on a play,’ is now officially titled, Much Ado About Sweet Nothing. Weirdly, my publisher felt that worked better. Curious.

Anyway, there it is. My first book cover. Huzzah!

(BTW, if you want a bit more of me wittering about romance writing related stuff, I’m on the Choc Lit authors’ blog today talking about What makes a hero: http://blog.choc-lit.co.uk/?p=5145)

After the unprecedented blogging success of my post about my holidays (it got three whole comments), I’ve decided to see if I can repeat the trick. Obviously, in the true spirit of sequels, this post will be not quite as interesting, and feel disappointingly lacking in originality.

So here we go – what I did on my weekend mini-break in London Town, ranked in reverse order of fun-itude! We saw 3 shows and did 3 museums, so read on to find out which were charttoppers and which fell flat. Feel free to play some Top of the Pops style chart rundown background music in your head to get you in the mood.

6. Wicked – the Musical

This is the musical based on the Good and Wicked Witch characters from The Wizard of Oz. The basic idea is that the story is retold from the Wicked Witch’s point of view, and the show makes us consider who actually decides that one person is Good and another Wicked, and whether we might take a different view if we heard the other side of the story. It’s a clever and interesting idea, and the show had absolutely stellar reviews both on Broadway and the West End, so it might be a surprise to see this coming in in bottom place on my weekend chart. Unfortunately, for me (and much beloved accompanying husband), it was just a bit meh. Very ballad heavy, lacking in memorable tunes (Defying Gravity excepted), and the stage set, whilst aesthetically impressive didn’t really contribute much to the performance. Add to that some pretty ropey diction from the performers, which undermined the impact of a lot of the songs, and the overall experience was never more than ok. Worth seeing if someone springs you a free (or very heavily discounted) ticket. We had £55 tickets, discounted to £30 and still felt like it wasn’t worth the money.

5. The Science Museum

A museum of highs and lows. Highs – being free, LaunchPad (the kid’s bit with lots of stuff to play with), the space gallery. Lows – the history of medicine galleries and the history of maths/computing gallery – both suffer from very dry, old-fashioned displays. The major low though seemed to be the lack of science. Lots of the museum is taken up with objects which are never really linked together into a story of scientific progress or endeavour. It’s just big rooms of stuff. I also docked big points for them calling themselves the Science Museum and having a display about homeopathy that at no point mentions how there’s no reliable scientific evidence of anything beyond a placebo effect from homeopathic treatment. Just an asterix and a footnote saying “Of course, this is bollocks” would have sufficed. It’s the SCIENCE Museum, not the RANDOM THINGS SOME PEOPLE BELIEVE Museum. Tsk.

4. Tate Modern

Another mix of highs and lows. Highs – being free (sensing a theme at all??), and some individual works, particularly some of the Picassos, the Alberto Giacometti sculptures, a Jackson Pollack and a Kandinsky painting which was my personal favourite. Lows – the feeling that I must be a bit thick cos I don’t really understand most of the art. Yes, I see that you’ve cut out some red paper. I totally get that you’ve stuck it to the wall. Yup, you have stuck it to the wall in quite a nice pattern. I can read on the little explanation card that this can be seen as a comment on the nature of materials and disposability, but I’m not really feeling it. Now, I’m not going to just diss Modern Art. I completely accept that some people get something from these installations that I don’t. But I still don’t.

3. The Globe Theatre Tour & Exhibition

Lovely tour guide who was super-enthusiastic and knowledgeable. Beautiful theatre. Interesting exhibition, which felt just the right size for the information being communicated. (Science museum take note – no endless cabinets of loosely associated objects here). Would have liked a little bit more time to see some of the live demonstrations (sword-fighting, costume making etc) that were going on, but I can’t really blame the exhibition for us not allowing enough time.

2. We Will Rock You

The surprise hit of the weekend. We bought tickets to this because we wandered along to the late tickets booth in Leicester Square on Saturday morning and this was what they had. It’s the Ben Elton scripted musical based on the music of Queen. The basic premise is that 300 years in the future rock music has been banned in favour of computer generated homogenised pop. Our hero and heroine are two teenagers who go on a quest to rediscover the old music and reinvent rock. It’s a terrible premise. Every rational expectation is that this show should be awful, but somehow it’s kind of briliant. I think there are basically three reasons it works despite itself. Firstly, Ben Elton’s script embraces the lunacy of the premise, makes lots of jokes about it and then cheerfully steamrollers through. The sheer gusto is hard to resist. Secondly, the familiarity of the music gives an instant feeling of audience involvement and engagement. Thirdly, the performances and production values were generally excellent throughout, and this was in a performance where three of the main characters were being played by understudies. Fully expected to hate this. Didn’t. Pretty much loved it. It was sort of the opposite of Wicked which has a good idea, poorly executed. This was a terrible idea, somehow elevated into a really very good show.

1. Much Ado About Nothing at the Globe Theatre

The standout event of the weekend, and the reason for the whole trip. I’d never been to a play at the Globe before. If you haven’t either, then you really should. Standing tickets for the yard immediately in front of the stage are only a fiver. That’s cheaper than the cinema and you have the possibility of being hugged, jostled, and spat on by the actors. The Globe experience is unlike a modern indoor theatre. The audience are much more open to distractions from outside the play, and the actors have to be completely engaged with the audience and the wider environment to keep the audience within the story.

The play itself, Much Ado About Nothing, is one of my favourite plays (so much so that I’ve based on novel on it), and this was a brilliant production. The scene stealing characters in Much Ado are always Benedick and Beatrice – if you get those two characters right, you’ve generally got a pretty good production, and this production got them both bang on. I was particularly impressed with how well all the actors played the comedy in the play. Comedy in Shakespeare is tricky with modern audiences. There’s a lot of wordplay, much of which doesn’t quite survive the jump across 400 years of development of English. This production played both the language and the physical comedy beautifully.

So to conclude, I think I’ve decided, through the method of gallivanting around our rather brilliant capital for three days, that I really am a very word-oriented girl. I’m not really moved by music when I can’t hear the words (Wicked). I’m not that interested in physical objects if I don’t have a sense of their narrative (Science Museum). I don’t really respond to a lot of visual art until I’ve read the card that tells me what to think (Tate Modern). I do very much like a good communicative tour guide (Globe Exhibition), a song I know the words too (We Will Rock You), and a bit of 400 year old romantic wordplay (Much Ado About Nothing).

Come back later in the week (or you know, maybe the week after) when I shall be thinking more random thoughts about things. In fact, why not click on the lovely “Subscribe” link up at the top of the page and I believe you’ll get a rather charming little email notification whenever I actually get around to thinking something new.